Editor’s Note:: This post was written by long-time friend of Blog for Iowa Ellen Ballas of Iowa City.

If Iowans want a better life, and who doesn’t, Mike Franken should be our next U.S. Senator.

Senator Chuck Grassley has been voting against constituent interests for years, hiding behind a big voice that is full of mostly lies and distorted rationale.  

It’s time voters pay more attention to our own economic interests.  Voters have an opportunity to get rid of him, let’s show Grassley the door.  

Grassley admires former President Ronald Reagan who was perhaps one of our worst presidents. 

As a foundation for discussion, Reagan permanently gutted organized labor in the U.S. which includes the middle class. In 1981, Reagan fired the air-traffic controllers (PATCO) after a 2-day strike and destroyed their union.  Reagan branded the strike illegal and wouldn’t allow workers to reapply for their jobs even though PATCO gave Reagan their endorsement for President after he requested it.  PATCO received promises from Reagan that he broke.  Specifically, PATCO wanted health coverage and better pay and working conditions due to high job stress.  Additionally, PATCO negotiated with the FAA for years, demanding better technology. They were unsuccessful.  

Republicans like Grassley picked up where Reagan left off when they had the opportunity.  It’s ongoing.  The middle class continues to take it on the chin.

Grassley does not deserve another day in elected office! 

For years Grassley has been rewarding corporations with tax breaks for outsourcing American jobs.  The middle class is fading.

For instance, in 2010, Grassley voted NAY on the  “Creating American Jobs and Ending Offshoring Act” (S. 3816).

Below is the link to an article worth reading.  I copied a few quotes that give insight into the egregious political stunts by Reagan and Grassley that put a major sector of the U.S. population, in a very rich country, deep in a hole:  

In 2022, in a study by the Brooking’s Institution, a senior researcher said:  The middle class “has been barely keeping up,” Isabel Sawhill, a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution, told Yahoo Finance. “In other words, their incomes [after accounting for inflation, taxes, and government benefits] have gone up a little bit, but not very much. And the fact that their incomes haven’t gone up very much for over four decades, tells you a lot because normally we’d expect middle-class incomes over that period of time to grow a lot.”

In the same article:  “It’s reflective of this long-running trend towards rising inequality in the U.S.,” Rakesh Kochhar, senior researcher at Pew Research Center, told Yahoo Finance. “Broad societal changes and technology and the decline of unions and the role of globalization — all these things have fit into what we observe as the shrinking of the middle class and the shift of income to upper-income households.”

According to Sawhill, a number of worrying implications come with inequality where it is. 

“I just think the fact that our politics are what they are right now means that we have all of these big long-term crises that we’re not dealing with,” she said. “The most obvious is climate change or nuclear war or what have you. But amongst them, I think, is ever-growing inequality.”

In November, we can change course by electing  Mike Franken for U.S. Senate.